Our Divided Political Heart (16 page)

But Obama was not simply ransacking the scriptures to find support for his favorite social programs. His talk was saturated with values and virtues. Contraception can reduce teen pregnancy rates, Obama declared, but so can “
faith and guidance
,” which “help fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.” And if all this sounded preachy, Obama had an answer: “Our fear of getting ‘preachy’ may
also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.”

Thus did a talented American politician find a way to marry America’s biblical and republican traditions behind a robust call for community. It was to define his rise to the presidency—in ways that were not always noticed.

The growing liberal responsiveness to the communitarian imperative produced a series of paradoxes in American politics. At the very moment when American liberals and the left were rediscovering the power of community in both its local and national forms—and even acknowledging in the process a debt to conservatives who had long insisted upon religion’s role in public life—conservatives themselves were moving away from their commitments to community. The power of a communitarian critique of individualism—in history, in philosophy, in politics, and in everyday life—called forth an increasingly militant defense of individualism that found a mass political outlet in the Tea Party movement and increasingly crowded out the more communal forms of conservatism. And rather than make common cause with their potential communitarian allies on the left, the conservative communitarians sharpened their differences with liberals by insisting that the forms of community built under the auspices of the national government could never fully claim legitimacy.

But there is a mystery here: how did conservatism, born in opposition to individualism, become the proud and unapologetic carrier of American individualism’s most robust strain?

In light of conservatism’s history, it is odd that cultivating community and common values has so receded as a central conservative preoccupation. Conservatism was born, after all, not to defend individualism but in revolt against it. “
Conservatism, as a distinguishable social philosophy
, arose in direct response to the French Revolution,” wrote Robert Nisbet, an influential old-school conservative. Standing “
in reaction to the individualistic Enlightenment
,” conservatives “stressed the small social groups of society,” seeing such clusters of humanity—and
not
individuals—as society’s “irreducible unit.”

Reacting to “economic change, moral secularism, and political centralization,” conservatives “insisted upon
the primacy of society to the individual
—historically, logically, and ethically.” They rejected the idea of society as “
a mechanical aggregate of individual particles
subject to whatever rearrangements may occur to the mind of the industrialist or the government official.” Conservatives, Nisbet was arguing, spurned the very notion that Thatcher later embraced. True conservatives, he declared, are always alive to the “
delicate interrelation of belief, habit, membership and institution
in the life of any society.” It’s of some interest in light of what has happened to conservatism that
the best one-volume collection of Nisbet’s work
is called
Tradition and Revolt
. Its subtitle now might be
From Edmund Burke to the Tea Party.

Seeing conservatism as an anti-individualistic creed is not an antique notion from the attic of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat or the
drawing room of a nineteenth-century Oxfordshire squire. George F. Will, who remained one of American conservatism’s leading voices right through the Tea Party rebellion, published
Statecraft as Soulcraft
in 1983 to insist on the continuing relevance of the old conservatism of Burke. Will lamented that America’s sense of community had become “
thin gruel
,” and he chided fellow conservatives “caught in the web of their careless anti-government rhetoric.”

“
Just as all education is moral education
because learning conditions conduct,” Will wrote, “much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.” He followed Burke in highlighting the importance of “
sentiments, manners and moral opinions
,” and argued that these were neither “private” nor “properly beyond the legitimate concern of public agencies.”

“
It is generally considered obvious that government
should not, indeed cannot legislate morality,” Will wrote at another point. “But in fact it does so, frequently; it should do so more often; and it never does anything more important.” Conservatism, he said, “is about the cultivation and conservation of certain values, or it is nothing.”

American conservatism, of course, had long been torn between libertarians and traditionalists, between those for whom the economic market was the primary object of their affections and those whose deepest commitments were to virtue, hierarchy, and Burke’s “sentiments, manners and moral opinions.” Russell Kirk, an intellectual leader of the traditionalist forces, spoke for many on his side in 1954 when he declared: “
Conservatism is something more than mere solicitude for tidy incomes
.” It’s not something many conservatives would say now. Kirk-style conservatives, such as Nisbet and George Will in his
Statecraft as Soulcraft
period, preferred values to profits, community to pure individualism, and self-discipline to consumerism.

The traditionalists and libertarian-leaning free market conservatives had feuded on the pages of William F. Buckley Jr.’s
National Review
magazine from the moment of its founding in 1955. If the traditionalists’ conservatism had the deeper roots, the free market conservatives held powerful sway in the United States during the Gilded Age and came into their own as a coherent political force when they organized in opposition to Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. Kim Phillips-Fein, demonstrating how historians can shed unexpected light on the present, offered a persuasive case that the new conservatism—often seen as the creation of Buckley’s
National Review
in the 1950s and 1960s and the neoconservatives and right-of-center think tanks in the 1970s—was actually born in opposition to Roosevelt. In
Invisible Hands
, she traced the rise of conservatism to the work of an “impassioned, committed” group of business leaders who saw in the New Deal “
a fundamental challenge to their power and their place in American society
.” In the more than forty years before Ronald Reagan’s victory, they worked with both politicians and intellectuals “
to resist liberal institutions and ideas, and to persuade others
to join in fighting back, until the liberal order began to falter.” History certainly rhymes. Seventy years on, supporters of the Tea Party found ample financial help from wealthy conservative business leaders certain that Obama, like Roosevelt before him, was reopening the path to socialism. The Koch brothers had forebears, including their own father, who belonged to the Birch Society.

The central texts that inspired the Tea Party rebellion were also canonical to the anti–New Deal business leaders. None was more important than Friedrich A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom
, published in 1944. Hayek, an Austrian economist who decamped to the London School of Economics in 1931 and eventually found his way to the University of Chicago, provided the anti–New Deal conservatives with both an inspiring theory and a way of disentangling themselves from a right fringe that had sympathized with Nazism and fascism in the 1930s. At the time Hayek wrote, Nazism was widely seen as an extremist movement of the right, an aberrant species of capitalism. On the contrary, the Austrian economist insisted, “
the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction
against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” Hitler’s party, after all, was committed to National
Socialism
. Viewed this way, even mild social democracy and forms of New Dealism could be charged with leading down the same “road to serfdom,” if at a more measured pace, because state planning inevitably led to collectivism and dictatorship. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life, which can be separated from the rest,” Hayek wrote, “
it is the control of the means for all our ends
.”

American progressives and European social democrats had long argued that government intervention provided a countervailing power to concentrated economic power. Government had the capacity to protect citizens from irrational and destructive market outcomes, and also to liberate them from subservience to monopolies, abusive employers, and the political power that accrued to large accumulations of wealth. But for Hayek, acquiescence to the market was preferable to stronger government, even strong democratic government. “
Unless this complex society is to be destroyed
,” Hayek wrote of modern capitalism, “the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.” In 1930s America, the “other man” conservatives had in mind was FDR. After 2008, he was Barack Obama.

What’s striking in retrospect is that Hayek injected into American conservatism a strain of thinking that was, at its heart, decidedly unconservative. As Phillips-Fein points out, Hayek himself strenuously rejected the idea that he was a conservative at all, insisting instead that he was a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. Conservatives, Hayek argued, were animated by “a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such.” Lacking “
faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment
,” conservatives “cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.” Hayek, by contrast, presented himself as someone who “could accept changes without apprehension” and supported “
a thorough sweeping away of the obstacles to free growth
.”

The tension between the traditionalists and the libertarians was thus fundamental. It went to the very definition of conservatism itself—and whether conservatism, as it was coming to be understood, was conservative at all. Confronting a contemporary liberalism that, in the 1950s at least, seemed to dominate the American consciousness and had sufficient influence in both political parties, William F. Buckley understood the need to broker an intellectual truce to keep his forces united against the liberal enemy—and, more important, in the battle against world Communism. His magazine gave birth to what came to be known as “fusionism,” an amalgam of ideas that sought to unite libertarians and traditionalists. It accepted the centrality of liberty but also the need for virtue.
Frank Meyer, Buckley’s chief ideologist
, argued that traditionalists failed to appreciate that virtue was meaningful only if individuals arrived at it voluntarily. Libertarians, in turn, needed to accept a belief in an “
objective moral order
” as “the only firm foundation of freedom.” Donald Devine, a political scientist who later worked for the Reagan administration, offered perhaps the neatest summary of fusionism. It involved “
utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends
.” Because fusionists believed that American society was conservative to its core, libertarianism would allow the country’s deepest traditionalist impulses free rein.

Fusionism was politically brilliant. It allowed the conservative movement to accommodate many tendencies, from libertarians who favored the legalization of drugs to Christian conservatives who focused on the spread of faith and individual virtue. But it was never intellectually stable. Fusionism worked better for conservatives when they found themselves in opposition (everyone could emphasize different reasons for opposing American liberalism) than when they held power. And it set up an ongoing contest over which wing of the movement would come to dominate the other. Which issues would actually take priority, tax cuts or a ban on abortion? Deregulation or the encouragement of religious faith? Was it more promising to wager on government’s capacity as a moral educator (the younger George Will’s emphasis) or on the likelihood that government would oppress and act foolishly (the thrust of much of Will’s more recent writing)? And, as Nisbet might ask, must conservatism still insist upon “the primacy of society to the individual,” or was Hayek’s revolution on behalf of the sovereign self complete?

Although power within conservatism shifted inexorably toward its individualistic wing in the thirty years after Reagan’s election, the communitarian strain died hard. As we’ve seen, Reagan himself understood the appeal of community, even if his economic policies were individualistic and had the effect of widening inequalities. “Reagan Democrats,” particularly working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest, were quintessential family-and-neighborhood people for whom “community” was not an abstraction but a concrete description of their way of life.

Among conservative intellectuals, the last great communitarian endeavor was the Mediating Structures project at the American Enterprise
Institute, which grew out of a manifesto issued in 1977 by the sociologist Peter Berger and the Lutheran pastor (later a Catholic priest) Richard John Neuhaus. The essay that inspired the project, “To Empower People,” might be read in retrospect as providing the core philosophy for Reagan Democrats before they even existed. It’s likely that Reagan was inspired by this forty-five-page pamphlet to add the value-laden trinity “
family, work, neighborhood
” to his broader promise of “peace and freedom.” Using italics for emphasis, Berger and Neuhaus trumpeted the importance of
“
those institutions standing between the individual
in his private life and the large institutions of public life”
at a moment when citizens were experiencing a “historically unprecedented dichotomy between public and private life.” Public life, they wrote, is ordered most importantly by “
the modern state itself
” but also by “the large economic conglomerates of capitalist enterprise, big labor, and the growing bureaucracies that administer wide sections of society, such as in education and the organized professions.” On the other side was “that modern phenomenon called private life,” which they saw as “a curious kind of preserve left over by the large institutions and in which individuals carry on a bewildering variety of activities with only fragile institutional support.”